Franklin

“ But never did the mind-illumined looks of man shine more divinely bright than did those, that day, of the generous Barry, the godlike Chatham, and the high-minded Dunning, when they beheld the noble form of Franklin. Though born in North America, he shines before their eyes as a true born son of Britain—the luminous and brave interpreter of her sacred constitution, and the wise politician who seeks to exalt her glory, lasting as the skies, on the broad base of impartial justice to all her children. ”

“ Those are always able to do the most who are doing many things. It is a period of young men now; it was a time of old men then. People sought wisdom from experience, not experiment.
The peace is signed. The bells are ringing, and oppressed peoples everywhere rejoice. There is an iris on the cloud of humanity. The name of Franklin fills the world, and in most places is pronounced like a benediction.
From a tallow-chandler's shop to palaces; from the companionship of Uncle Ben, the poet, to that of royal blood, people of highest rank, and the most noble and cultured of mankind ”

“ Franklin, so far from concurring with this view, declared that many new and instructive fables could still be invented, and, when asked whether he could think of one, replied that, if he was furnished with pen and paper, he would produce one forthwith. The pen and paper were handed to him, and, in a few minutes, he summed up the existing relations between England and America in this fable:
Once upon a time, an eagle, scaling round a farmer's barn, and espying a hare, darted down upon him like a sunbeam, seized him in his claws, and remounted with him in the air. ”

“ In the midst of the provincial and barren waste of our intellectual existence in the eighteenth century there stands out in sharp relief the luminous genius of Franklin. It is true that Franklin was cosmopolitan in thought, that his name and fame and achievements in science and literature belonged to mankind; but he was all this because he was genuinely and intensely American. His audacity, his fertility, his adaptability, are all characteristic of America, and not of an English colony. ”

“ The name of Franklin is peculiarly endeared to Printers—a name honored and cherished by the civilized world. As a Philosopher, the god-like genius of Franklin towered to the very heavens—bringing the Thunder King down from his chariot of fire in the clouds, and corking him up in a bottle! As a Statesman, he exhibited matured wisdom and unerring judgment and forecast. As a Patriot, he exhibited the most exalted attachment to his country. ”

“ There are few persons on record to whose individual genius and exertions a community has owed so much as to Dr. Franklin. If William Penn was the political founder of the province, Franklin may perhaps be denominated the architect of its literature, the gifted author of many of its best institutions, and the father of some of the finest features of our character. It is seldom, however, that Providence has vouchsafed such a length of years to such an intellect, and still more seldom that such events occur as those which developed the powers and capacities of Franklin’s mind. ”

“ Franklin loved the French, he could smile at their foibles, in dressing their hair so that they could not wear a hat, but were compelled to carry it under their arms; also in filling their noses with tobacco. “These,” said he, “are mere follies. There is nothing wanting, in the character of a Frenchman, that belongs to that of an agreeable and worthy man.”
It may perhaps be mentioned, as a defect in the character of Franklin, that when in France he could see nothing but the beautiful. ”

“ To another name of another generation, yet of the same proud national nativity, the glory has been reserved of having first taught mankind to reach even beyond the results of Franklin, and to subdue in a modified state, into the familiar and practical uses of a household servant who runs at his master's bidding, this same once frightful and tremendous element. Indeed the great work of science which Franklin commenced for the protection of man, you have most triumphantly subdued to his convenience. ”

“ Self-made men of eminence have been quite numerous in America for a hundred years. Franklin was our first hero of this kind, and I am inclined to think our greatest. The others have achieved wealth or political importance; sometimes both. But Franklin achieved not only wealth and the reputation of a diplomatist and a statesman, but made himself a most accomplished scholar, a man of letters of world-wide fame, a philosopher of no small importance, and as an investigator and discoverer in science he certainly enlarged the domain of human knowledge. ”

“ Every one save the privy councilors had to stand from beginning to end of the proceedings. Franklin occupied a position beside the fireplace, where he stood throughout immovable as a statue, his features carefully composed so that not one trace of emotion was apparent upon them, showing a degree of self-control which was extraordinary even in one who was at once a man of the world and a philosopher, with sixty-eight years of experience in life. ”

“ Fifteen or twenty years afterwards, with added experience, Franklin became a very different sort of person. The man of forty, laboriously investigating science, discovering the secrets of electricity, and rejecting everything that had not been subjected to the most rigid proof, bore but little resemblance to the precocious youth of twenty-three, the victim of any specious sophism that promised a millennium. ”

“ Franklin was a man not only of iron resolution and indomitable courage, but of a singular geniality, uprightness, and simplicity, which kindled into the warmest affection his influence over his comrades and subordinates. ”

“ By these experiments Franklin's theory was established in the most convincing manner. When the truth of it could no longer be doubted, envy and vanity endeavoured to detract from its merit. That an American, an inhabitant of the obscure city of Philadelphia, the name of which was hardly known, should be able to make discoveries and to frame theories which had escaped the notice of the enlightened philosophers of Europe, was too mortifying to be admitted. He must certainly have taken the idea from some one else. An American, a being of an inferior order, make discoveries! ”

“ Something like the feelings of Sir Isaac Newton, when the falling apple brought to his ear the real music of the spheres, must have been those of Franklin, when the loose filaments of twine bristled up stiffly, as if stirred by some violated instinct of wild freedom, and the stream of sparks from the key told him that he was right in supposing that the mysterious and appalling agency, which had for centuries been associated in the human mind with the resistless wrath of Omnipotence, was but the same subtle fluid that had so often lit up his electrical apparatus with its playful corruscations. ”

“ Benjamin Franklin is now a seed in the wind, but he is a good seed in the wind—good at heart, with a right purpose. The stream of life is turned aside, but it will flow [147] true again toward the great ocean of that which is broadest and best.
For this little Jenny at home is hoping, and Abiah Franklin praying, and Josiah Franklin keeping silence in regard to his family affairs. ”

“ We find Franklin in a state of rebellion against the prevailing tone of thought, writing against it in his brother’s newspaper at the risk of imprisonment, and in a manner more bitter and violent than anything he afterwards composed. If he had remained in Boston it is not likely that he would ever have taken seriously to science, for all his energies would have been absorbed in fighting those intolerant conditions which smothered all scientific inquiries. ”

“ To a young man, involved in the hopes and anxieties of his first struggles for a foothold in the world, the history of Franklin, as a business man, could not but be full of inspiration, even if it had not flowered into higher forms of achievement, and were not reflected in publications of rare literary value. But, putting altogether out of sight the great fame acquired by Franklin in scientific and political fields, a peculiar vividness is imparted to his business career by other circumstances which should not be overlooked. ”

“ Every sheet of water takes the hue of the sky above it, and intermixed with these observations of Franklin, which were themselves, to say the least, fully as much the natural fruit of a remarkably equable and sanguine temperament as of religious confidence, are other observations of his upon religious subjects which were deeply colored by his practical genius, tolerant disposition and shrewd insight into the imperfections of human institutions and the shortcomings of human character. ”

“ Once Franklin sought to corner Madame Brillon with a story, which makes us feel for a moment as if the rod of transformation was beginning to work a backward spell, and the Benjamin Franklin of Craven Street and Independence Hall to be released from the spell of the French Circe:
To make you better realize the force of my demonstration that you do not love me, I commence with a little story:
A beggar asked a rich Bishop for a louis by way of alms. You are wild. No one gives a louis to a beggar. ”

“ The business career of Franklin did not move upon such an exalted plane as his scientific or political career, but it was the basis on which the entire superstructure of his renown as a philosopher and a statesman was built up; inasmuch as it was his early release from pecuniary cares which enabled him to apply himself with single-minded devotion to electrical experiments, and to accept at the hands of the people of Pennsylvania the missions to England which opened up the wider horizon of his postmeridian life. ”

“ Upon reaching Philadelphia, Franklin presented the letter of his father to Sir William Keith. The Governor, upon reading the letter, said,
“Your father is too prudent. There is a great difference in persons. Discretion does not always accompany years; nor is youth always without it. But since he will not set you up, I will do it myself. Give me an inventory of the things necessary to be had from England, and I will send for them. You shall repay me when you are able. I am resolved to have a good printer here and I am sure you must succeed.” ”

“ From an old French engraving in the collection of Mr. Clarence S. Bement, of Philadelphia. Death has seized Franklin and is dragging him to the lower world. The figure half kneeling is America, with her bow and arrows and the skin of a wild beast, imploring Death to spare her deliverer. Fame is flying in the air, with a crape on her arm and a trumpet, announcing that le grand Franklin has saved his country and given her liberty in spite of tyrants. ”

“ Franklin, in the garb of a printer's boy, walking up Market Street, eating one of his rolls of bread, and carrying the other under his arm, could have believed, that at a future period he would become one of the most celebrated men of the age. ”

“ Occasional shadows, of course, fall across the happy and honored life reflected in Franklin's letters to Deborah. We cannot have the evening, however soft and still, without its fading light; or, as Franklin himself put it in one of these letters, "we are not to expect it will be always Sunshine." Strenuous and absorbing as were his public tasks during each of his missions to England; signalized as the latter were by the honors conferred on him by ancient seats of learning, and the attentions paid him by illustrious men ”

“ Of all the productions of Franklin, the Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanac, are those upon which his literary fame will chiefly rest. Of the former, we have already said too much to say much more about it. It is the only thing written by Franklin that can properly be called a book, and even it is marked by the brevity which he regarded as one of the essentials of good writing. ”

“ Franklin may have as a politician or a scholar, there is no point of light in which his character shines with more lustre than when we view him as a man or a citizen. He was eminently great in common things. Perhaps no man ever existed whose life can, with more justice, be denominated useful. Nothing ever passed through his hands without receiving improvement, and no person ever went into his company without gaining wisdom. ”

“ For no man or even combination of men, whom it was possible to send from the provinces, could have done them the services which Franklin was about to render. Besides the general power of his mind, he had peculiar fitnesses. He was widely known and very highly esteemed in England, where he moved in many circles. Among members of the nobility, among men high in office, among members of Parliament, among scientific men and literary men, among men of business and affairs, and among men who made a business of society, he was always welcome. ”

“ Franklin loved and gloried in this great country of which he was born a citizen. He deplored the measures that threatened the severance of those colonies from the mother country, and would have prevented the severance if the king's folly had been any thing short of incurable. The most wonderful thing in the whole controversy was that the argument, fact, and fun which Franklin wrote and inspired, from 1765 to 1774, had only momentary influence on the course of events. "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." ”